The Datum Report

Occupation 5432 · Skilled trades occupations

Bakers and flour confectioners

Half of full-time bakers and flour confectioners in the UK earn more than £29,117 a year, and half earn less.

Bakers and flour confectioners prepare and bake dough, pastry and cake mixtures and make and finish flour confectionary products by hand.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic entry requirements. Training is typically received on-the-job or by apprenticeship. Apprenticeships and traineeships leading to NVQs/SVQs or equivalent qualifications at levels 2 and 3 are available.

What the work involves

• weighs ingredients according to recipe
• mixes ingredients using hand or machine to obtain the required consistency
• rolls and cuts pastry, stretches, kneads and moulds dough to form bread, rolls and buns
• fills and glazes pastry, mixes ingredients for cakes
• bakes bread, pastry and cakes
• makes cake decorations, spreads icing, fillings and toppings on products

Also called

Baker · Baker’s assistant · Bakery manager · Cake decorator · Confectioner

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for bakers and flour confectioners, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 6 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Butchers · Catering and bar managers · Chefs · Cooks · Fishmongers and poultry dressers